NITROGEN AVAILABILITY IN WORLD

According to a new report, an imbalance in nitrogen availability has been reported across the globe, with some places having an excess and others a shortage of the element.
Rising carbon dioxide levels and other global changes have increased demand for nitrogen by plants and microbes.
Plants grow quickly when exposed to high carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations.
The presence of high CO2 levels dilutes the availability of nitrogen in Plants, thus, their demand for nitrogen goes up.
Other factors contributing to nitrogen decline include warming and disturbances, including wildfire
Many areas of the world, where people do not contribute excessive amounts of nitrogen to the soil, long-term records demonstrate that nitrogen availability is declining, with important consequences for plant and animal growth.
Burning fossil fuels, application of nitrogen-based fertilizers, and other activities can dramatically increase the amount of biologically available nitrogen in an ecosystem.

Consequences of Nitrogen Imbalance

Declining nitrogen availability can be linked to insect apocalypse.
Climate change, insecticides, herbicides, light pollution, invasive species and changes in agriculture and land use are causing Earth to lose about 1-2% of its insects each year. This is being termed as “Insect Apocalypse”.
It can encourage swarming in some species of locusts.
Further, low nitrogen availability could limit plants’ ability to capture CO2 from the atmosphere.
When excessive nitrogen accumulates in the streams, inland lakes and coastal bodies of water, it could sometimes result in eutrophication, leading to harmful algal blooms, dead zones and fish kills.
When a water body becomes overly enriched with minerals and nutrients which induce excessive growth of algae or algal bloom. This process also results in oxygen depletion of the water body.
In humans, high levels of nitrogen in the groundwater are linked to intestinal cancers and miscarriages and can be fatal for infants.

Key Highlights about Nitrogen

Nitrogen is one of the primary nutrients critical for the survival of all living organisms.
Nitrogen gas makes up 78% of our atmosphere and nitrogen is also a part of many molecules essential to life like proteins, nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) and some vitamins.
Nitrogen is found in other biologically important compounds such as alkaloids and urea too.
Nitrogen is thus an essential nutrient for all life-forms and life would be simple if all these life-forms could use the atmospheric nitrogen directly.
Although nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere as Nitrogen gas (N2), it is largely inaccessible in this form to most organisms, making nitrogen a scarce resource and often limiting primary productivity in many ecosystems.
Only when nitrogen is converted from Nitrogen gas into ammonia (NH3) does it become available to primary producers, such as plants.

The major transformations of nitrogen gas are through the process of: